Reading roundup
Under-vaccination in Africa, Chinese emigration, weaponization of migration
Happy Halloween! But remember, don’t be scared of demography. It’s not the size (or composition) of your population that matters, it’s what you do with it. To round out the month, here’s a little reading roundup for you. ICYMI, this month I also had posts on my new TED talk (over 600K views!) and how to engage older workers. Next up for the newsletter: the demographic trends I’m flagging for 2024.
COVID lockdowns have left a short-term legacy of un- and under-vaccinated children, 6.8 million children in West and Central Africa alone. “India leads the world with the largest number of children with zero doses – 2.7 million – followed by Nigeria with 2.2 million,” according to a UNICEF report via NPR. The eldest of these children are now turning 3. Will the global community be able to make up lost ground? Already, measles cases doubled from 2021 to 2022.
After staying to reap the benefits of China’s economic boom for years, many Chinese professionals are now fleeing the country, over 600,000 between 2022-2023. Given China’s shrinking population, I would expect them to start tightening restrictions on emigration. Letting that human capital go poses a significant issue, even if some send remittances home. While the US benefited from past waves of Chinese emigration, Canada and Europe are the more attractive destinations now, due to complicated and restrictive US immigration rules and quality of life concerns.
One proposed solution to illegal migration is creating more legal pathways. To that end, “Last January, the Biden administration announced a plan it hoped would deter illegal immigration, saying it would accept 30,000 people per month from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela and authorize them to work in the U.S., as long as they come legally, have eligible sponsors and pass background checks.” Now, Nicaragua’s Ortega is being accused of allowing hundreds of charter flights from Haiti carrying smuggled migrants to land in Nicaragua so that Haitians can travel from there to the US. He may be trying to get leverage so the US will halt sanctions against his family and administration. In political demography terms, this is ‘migration as a foreign policy issue,’ specifically in this case, ‘weaponizing migration.’ This accusation reminds me of when Belarus’s Lukashenko was accused in 2021 of facilitating entry to Belarus from Iraqi and Afghan migrants, primarily, who wanted a way into Europe. Such accusations are hard to prove, but entirely plausible, as human smuggling networks provide revenue for strapped governments serving as middlemen, and a boost of political influence with the US or EU, which they might otherwise struggle to secure. I discuss more examples of this in my book. Still, 31,000 people out of Haiti on these flights? Can that be true?
If you want more on the demographic angle of the Israel-Palestine conflict, check out the chapter in my book titled, “Warfare and Wombfare.” I checked, and I mention Israel 97 times in my book.
Employers are [allegedly] becoming more open to hiring older workers. I think the self-reported data on “openness” to hiring older workers in this article is fairly useless (although I’m surprised it’s not an even higher percentage), but there are some nuggets, like, “More than a quarter (28%) offer specific training that addresses generational differences and helps prevent age discrimination.” Those over 65 years are only 7% of the workforce but many want to be employed. Older workers around the world still face legal barriers to staying in the workforce and that has to end if we’re to have resilience in the face of population aging.
